At Microsoft Connect 2015, Microsoft announced more good news for Linux software developers. Visual Studio can now be used to remotely debug Linux applications using the GDB debugger. The Visual Studio Code editor that Microsoft released for Linux earlier this year was also open-sourced.

Visual Studio can now debug and compile Linux apps

Visual Studio 2015 added a big new feature that would once be unheard of—the ability to compile applications for Linux. Microsoft is now taking this further, releasing the preview of a Visual Studio extension that will allow you to debug a Linux application right inside Visual Studio. It uses GDB, the GNU Project Debugger.

Microsoft made headlines earlier this year when it released Visual Studio Code: https://code.visualstudio.com/This lightweight editor for building and debugging “modern web and cloud applications” is based on Google’s Chromium code—the same code that underlies Chrome. Microsoft released this for free, and it released it for desktop Linux and Mac.

Visual Studio Code is now open-source, so not only can you download and use it—you can download the code and modify it: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscodeThis means Linux distributions will be free to package it up and distribute it in their package managers, too. Microsoft open-sourced much of the .NET server code earlier this year, too: http://www.dotnetfoundation.org/projects